friday nite - met friends at 'stop making friends'. got home on my lonesome to find everyone in bed, except girl staying over in lounge, who i woke en route to kitchen. sat kitchen table and talked to her about hinduism for two cups coffee. bed.
saturday daytime - three for two book deal... peter cook anthology, became compulsive habit of weekend. out that nite, detournement and afterparty... the boys at the club were patrolling the dancefloor like vultures in ever-decreasing circles - hunting for fresh meat, fruitlessly... i was open to the idea of meeting someone, but it wasn't happening... and my upper lost touch with lower body for pretty much remainder of the evening.
sunday = prepping music for club. sunday beast later and mite tipsy. shamed self by screaming 'destroyer of my happiness' in street, long story, not unfunny.
progress on 'a fire in a niteclub' continues apace. bulk of raw material now in place - waiting to be pulled together and redrafted. has been a breeze, sincerely.
and maybe that's got some relation to the sudden change in my mood... occasional bubbles of melancholy pop and... well... essentially, honestly... am such a lusty bunny at the moment. feel like someone's connected me to the mains. god knows how long i can hold off urge to pounce like panther on someone or other...
aarrrrrrrrrrrgggGGGGG.
other news: i have 101 hours paid holiday to take, before end december. this means nice size xmas break... and (tbc) some quality writing time 21-30 nov. could weep with happy. seriously.
was up until three downloading hott trax for club.
feel like animated death.
it never goes away. it's only ever interrupted. amazing how closely they are, in me - the urge for attention and self-expression... a couple of creepers coiled along their length.
need to lock down and get some work done. need to channel. need to not waste evenings on sleep and eating. internal stress is building, white noise behind my eyes - feel like i'm generating heat again.
if i can have the play finished early next year... if i cd take xmas to finalize it...
wish i cd take a month in the country, somewhere no one knows me, no people and no distractions, no nitelife or television... somewhere no work except The Work.
a month is such a stretch of time. if I cd just cut myself adrift from my life that long... life's been so urgent, so hedonistic this year... i cd take a month off easy, work and routine, friends and parties...
need to write. need to do this, crown my year. prove something to self, 'cause i get so ground down by chores, i get so fucking bored.
i need to stop having fun long enough to do something that matters.
woke with a sore spot on skull. a sensitive area round the back of my head. laid my hand on, circled area - but there was only hair in disarray. anyway, i was late again, forgot about it... until mid-afternoon, writing a diary entry in an airless office, autumn sunlight sliced by blinds.
should be in a good mood. clearly aren't, really. maybe not clearly, actually - maybe secretly... as of yesterday, a new play, short play - exploded out from nowhere. it's called 'a fire in a niteclub'. it's about... well, you can probably guess. one scene, three actors, fifteen minutes. driver's got this idea - an art event next summer. and as soon as i'd volunteered to write a sketch, the thing rolled up.
yeah... so, in the end, against odds and by surprise, ghost mainlined his half of zine thru at almost the last minute. big relief, and liked a lot instantly. lateness of arrival was minor problemo, however.... me, drivey and lexxy had spent earlier evening sittin' round pumpkin-carvin'... was disgusting. but fun. but disgusting.
housemates went bedward, more/less smug/drunk. i crawled up into office, passed briefly out and then - worked my way all thru the nite - printing and compiling his stuff, sorting the last unsorted page of my own... eventually stumbled to bed at 7:05, with a gutful of hunger, and caffeine headache.
up at... well, was late for work - put it that way. three hours late. eek.
ghost arrived friday. no time to catch-up - with all the accumulated final prep, a landslide, a panic. in the end, went ahead to venue, found it already pretty full, and us running late... but initial glitch didn't matter - stayed really, really busy all nite with shifting crowd coming, going... we lowered lights, played *atmospheric* music and watched as dressed-up hallow-freaks crept in and lurked. didn't have time to, myself - irritating - i'd bought bandages, safety pins etc... (was going to be the semi-visible man).
people really seemed to dig the zines - plenty sitting round reading them intently - think ghost was anxious at first - seeing his audience actually in the flesh (his zine was full of hella personal info). but he scored some compliments, made some connections, and got over...
from there, in triumph, to party. was reasonable size, nothing excessive. bunch of us deejaying - and all facing the problem of a temperamental overheating amp. proud to say my set, brief as it was, seemed to go over really well. was one of those nites where everyone is a bit tired and emotional - lots of hugging, compliments, monster make-up...
saturday... first, 'when i plugged her in, she just blew up' - with a drag theme. again, failed to rise to the occasion (though my genius idea of dressing in previous nite's bandages and going as 'mid-op transsexuall' wd have won me a prize - they said). sarah and heidi were in full drag king gear and looked ace (sarah's false beard so huge that she looked like a rabbi) and sarah's boyf, iain was lady. role-reversal in full effect - especially when they played up to it in the disco.
disco, afterwards, being richard x at the joint... went and talked at him, obviously (hell - i even went stood in the deejay booth...) the drag contingent etc were really entertaining - encouraged general mood of playfulness.
and there was flirting.
a party after, which ended. a walk home, and bed. sunday was a non-day. ghost departed mid-afternoon and survivors sat round, doing not much. we got take-out curry, wine, beer -bulletproof monk' on david. don't watch. bad. really bad. like - reheated cliche soup.
think it's only a matter of time before i... feel increasing need. every weekend is wall-to-wall fun, but find myself missing - that elusive secret ingredient...
seems i've reconnected, just recently, with who i actually am. by which i mean, i suppose - who i want to be. to be further qualified as: the role i wish to assume in society.
not only am i writing again, i'm writing things that come from somewhere deeper than the level of conversational wit. i'm puking my guts onto the page again, and it's a real relief to see.
the play, which has hit thirteen scenes and counting - is, if not strictly speaking lived-experience autobio - certainly an exploration of those elements in my life that mean the most to me.
also: engaging with another Lo-Res flyer - for immediate public consumption - made me sit up and decide what i wanted to say. that was useful: bitter truth as a wake-up call.
and notopia, too... the confessional mode... know this page has been lacklustre, secondhand - for a while now - for which i can only... hedonism - by which i mean fun - and the after-effects of fun, the fatigue - doesn't make for reflection. at least - not until the last in a long line of mornings after...
the thing with love - romantic love - so far as someone like me, who hasn't ever really wholly engaged with it, can see - is exclusivity. is the idea that, of everyone, everywhere, you've been chosen. that there's one person at least who thinks you're special. that you're something more than the norm.
i don't know. i find it difficult to relate to, sometimes. seems so noble, so formally beautiful. but also, as a consequence, kind of unreal. i saw my parents' divorce up close and personal. i was old enough to know what was happening, but not to understand. for years after, i would matchmake fictional characters - in books, on teevee - i would obsessively put them in pairs, i would will it to work. didn't occur to me till not so long ago - i was trying to put my parents' marriage back together.
maybe something in me - that idiot urge to fake a utopia, the idea that you can build something beautiful even with the weakest, ugliest, most ill-fitting ingredients - died eventually. as i got older, realism took over. the more i knew, the more i realised - my parents should never have been together. it was a mistake, a mismatch - they each chose the wrong person, they gave how many years to a relationship that...
but still, i can't bring myself to go through with condemning their decision. i just hope that they were in love, at least at first, that it wasn't always a compromise.
it's strange. always think, if i could go back in time - if i could tell them not to do it... 'cause i hate that my mum, certainly (dad remarried) never had a lifelong love, always had to go thru everything alone... of course, then i'd never have been born, but the logic holds. they should never have been together. in an ideal world, i wouldn't actually exist.
and obviously i'd be saying a whole other spiel if the marriage had worked, if they'd approached it differently... history is how things happened - but it isn't the only way things could have happened. stupid to say it was an unwinnable battle just because they lost.
i wonder how i'd look at love if they had made it work...
wrote a line, a while back. 'it's not yr actions that come back to get you - it's the lack...' thought maybe it'd serve as a slogan on a flyer sometime, something like that.
the other end of another weekend, though, and I can't help but think... i mean, it was ok, lower case... thursday nite, miss pain again - like a mentally disturbed pantomime, as sarah announces from the stage... 'we've got some bad news - since our last gig... dom's been sectioned.' dom, in homemade straitjacket, takes opportunity to chew on own grin, and mutter, 'i can smell you on the microphone...'
friday nite, chx/dx had invaded the ocean rooms. they were playing VIP room, good sets, so far as i remember... lounged on bed and had good one-on-ones with some people i maybe haven't spoken with so much before. it felt like a good way to start.
saturday daytime, into town for poster/flyering. boring. but out at nite for 'detournement'. best for a while. was approached on dancefloor by girl i collided with an age ago (like, last year - before club). but we'd exchanged about three sentences, and suddenly her bottom lip's going and she has to break off. was unsettling. told her friend to look after her and exited, stage left. barely know her. didn't know what else to do.
'cause the clocks went back they played an extra hour - but mass exodus near-cleared the club for some reason - a lightweight lemming stampede outside. was unimpressed.
after that, inevitable afterparty at friend heidi heelz' place. very select group peeps. also: dog. also: snake. stayed till morning and split. slept a short time sunday, but once up, was vee productive - working on hallowzine. will prolly go right down to the wire, but will be completed, am sure. yes. sunday afternoon - went shopping for colouring books. sunday nite - 'kill bill', which i liked.
woke up monday morning, came to work and while here, pulled together the ideas i've been tinkering with, to deliver the next - and best - new text for the new new Lo-Res flyer yet.
...but back to sunday morning, in bed with me - was lying there in whatever little light made it thru my curtains, adding it up, trying to figure out why i didn't feel satisfied... despite the pretty solid hedonism of the nites before... surprised myself by deciding it was basic loneliness.
guess i could have done with a little more than friendship, this weekend...
almost feel like my mood, which remains changable and treacherous - is just the background noise generated by a long string of actions right now - that it only intersects with my actual experience at tangents - when i stop to take stock, when i reflect... then i feel enveloped by it... as if it's pouring down the length of me.
much of the time i feel comfortably emotionless, a train on a track... quietly busy and low-level stressed - but never so much of anything. annnnyway: have reason to be pleased. as of today, thirteen scenes sit on various hard drives, as close to complete as i can get them in one take. the play from here on in is less well-plotted and sketched, which means progress will doubtless slow - but at the time, injects the spontaneity and fun of writing from scratch. estimating between five and seven more scenes to come. then a break - return to rewrite - and i should be done.
past week has been productive - in retrospect - but frustrating - as it's actually happening. have continued heroic reconnection with 'Back to the Sea', and hit twelfth scene (fairly ruff first draft) earlier this morning. the gaps and waits in my working day still serving me well...
aside from that, the pressing cause is the new Lo-Res flyer, but that's proving difficult to perfect. three distinct versions, thus far - one, taking Karen Horney's 'search for glory' and re-interpreting artistic ambition as neurotic symptom, another more or less an elegy, a look over my shoulder at all my peers who surrendered said ambition... the third, the kind of inflammatory, potentially juvenile prose-poem propaganda I can rattle off in my sleep. not one absolutely satisfactory...
and meanwhile, a hallowzine to nail down, having already galvanized a couple of co-conspirators (hungryghost and evergreen) into action. text is essentially written, and shouldn't take too long from this point on - but it needs to be completed this time next week, which sincerely gives me the fear...
i quite often nowadays get into a shallow state of sleep where i dream, fully aware that's what this is, and able, to some degree at least to get a little authorial control - a kind of arms-length distance... often it takes the form of movement within some environment, and i can kind of explore - though it still feels like i'm essentially drifting forward - that my only real choice is to continue along the tracks or resurface. another common thing is a kind of awareness there is something unknown in a room, around a corner - that there is something to be afraid of, and i can either go forward to meet it - or make myself wake - which really isn't so hard.
it was mid-afternoon, i was kind of zoned-out, low-level fatigue getting the best of me. lay on my bed, fully-clothed and found myself gliding slowly down a white corridor. there's a pause - a doorless doorframe in front of me, a room behind it around to the left. and i know there's something around the corner, and i don't have to - i've slowed to a near-halt now, i could still sit up if i wanted to... there's a feeling of dread, of generalized fear, worrying away at the edge of me... but i decide i'm going to do it, and i lurch forward again, into the room - now my vision here is more like a camera view than anything, so i only see what's directly in front of me... the doorway is white, as is the wall - and i'm passing into the room now, it's narrow, also white, everything - no fixtures or fittings, no furniture - the camera pans as i turn with it, as woozy as a drunk, but disembodied, as if i'm floating slowly down to the white carpet and - i can see around the corner - i am sliding down the wall and i can feel my mouth stretching open as wide as it can, i am screaming no sound, just unspeakable fucking fear clenching me into the foetal position as i stare into the centre of the white room.
in the end, theme we decided upon for the nite was straight-up contrast collage of mainstream and underground. so we showed brakhage's 'dog star man' and matthew barney's 'the order' (from cremaster 3) - but at the same time, filled the dancefloor with almost 160 neon balloons - standard dogbowls of sweets on the tables, augmented this time out by bubble liquid and blowers, party poppers etc... never quite sold out, though edged over capacity overall - just not all at once. dancefloor good, general reaction really positive. at first i winced every time i heard a balloon pop, having inflated most of them personally - but then i decided it meant that, each time one burst, one of my breaths was released and i was pretty much happy with that idea.
was fucking drunk by the end - having scraped thru a systems error - coke spilled onto D.A.I.S.Y.'s keyboard and accompanying glitch and crash. taxi went for replacement, and we were ok, but - dunno - talked to drivey about it and neither of us felt the same elation that followed the last two... still, it was a definite solid success, and my final song of the nite - 'i know it's over' by the smiths saw virtually everybody in the place coming together in one big ring - it was just as i'd hoped, really memorable, really cute - a feeling of community or something... a collective emotion...
managed to pack, stagger to taxi and so on, straight to bed on returning home. saturday nite i was out alone, but hooked up with others early on for 'detournement' - massively heart-warming nite of long conversations and multi-player bonding. also initiated a new form of in-disco entertainment - rules were to stand around looking bored until one or other counted down from three (mid-song) upon which everyone involved would throw themselves immediately into full-on going-for-it freak out dancing. it was ludicrously amusing to those in the know, but probably somewhat disconcerting for innocent bystanders - which made it even better, natch.
back to a mini-party, more talking, arabic women's magazines, kitchen bowling - taxi ride home at six in the am, and long largely washed-out day during which i've wandered round house alone, read about 300 pages of a harry potter book someone left lying around, washed virtually all my clothes, and had fearsome dream, mid-afternoon napping. dream deserves entry of own - to be continued...
i know i've been guilty recently - when i do actually bother to update at all - of turning in a bunch of essential abstracts... vague paragraphs detailing the minor points of my moods as they come, go.
need to anchor it more, join the dots, am aware - want to reconnect with this as an actual journal of an actual person - something i can look back on and fix in time, in narrative and action - not just a cloud of adjectives.
so start again: overcast afternoon and i'm stringing out the last few hours of work before going home early to finalize the preps for the club tonite. has been ludicrously (and unusually) stress-free so far, and as a consequence i'm looking forward to it more - without the last-minute panic, the to-do lists, the things going wrong, like it or not...
we'll hit london road, scope the cheap shops for stuff to put on the tables - last time out it was revolving police lights - plus bags of sweets for the dogbowls. they've never let us down yet (but always aware we're at the mercy of their stock situation). then the final transfer of new tracks to D.A.I.S.Y. the peecee deejay, testing the same... getting all the props and etc ready, followed by ourselves - down at the ballroom an hour and a half before it all kicks off - blowing up balloons, sorting the filmscreen...
